“Don’t Defend Me Anymore”

Armstrong's doping admissions to Oprah opened the former racer to charges of fraud. (courtesy OWN)

No tears flowed during the second half of Lance Armstrong’s confessional interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which the disgraced cycling champion admitted to cheating throughout his seven-year run atop Tour de France podiums and pointedly lying about it. But Armstrong’s eyes went wet and he paused for long intervals to rein in his emotions while describing the fallout of his duplicity within his own family—especially with regard to his five children.

In one segment, he described hearing his oldest son, Luke, 13, defending him against the doping accusations that had been Armstrong’s albatross for more than a decade. That’s when he knew he had to come clean with his children, Armstrong said. Winfrey asked what he told his son, and after a long pause during which he struggled with his composure, Armstrong said he told the boy, “Don’t defend me anymore. Don’t.”

The interview capped a 150-minute program during which the mythic Armstrong fable—in which he beat back cancer only to rise to the pinnacle of one of the world’s toughest athletic endeavors—was wholly and permanently demolished. The second segment also touched on the abrupt exodus of Armstrong’s sponsors, his ardent wish to return to competitive sports, and a denial that he tried to bribe the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency while it investigated him.

Winfrey’s network appeared to arrange the second half of the broadcast to cover more personal terrain—much of it focusing on his confession and the ramifications of Armstrong’s astonishing fall. He again vacillated between showing contrition and evincing a sort of robotic desire to move on from the wreckage he’d created. For some, it will be the first step toward forgiveness; for others, the interview will look like a callow exercise engineered to get him back to the starting lines of the marathons and triathlons he craves.

Armstrong said he lost $75 million in a one- to two-day period when all of his sponsors abandoned him. “Gone,” he said. “And probably never coming back.” (He evaded Winfrey’s question about whether he had anything left, saying only that he’d lost his “future income.”)

He also described the pain of being asked to withdraw from his leadership position at Livestrong, the foundation he founded in 1997, which has raised nearly $500 million toward its mission of supporting cancer patients. “The foundation is like my sixth child,” he said. “To make that decision and step aside, that was big. It was the right thing for the organization, but it hurt like hell.”

Armstrong did little to end speculation that he was confessing in a bid to diminish his lifetime ban on sanctioned Olympic-sport events. When Winfrey inquired into this potential motivation, Armstrong quickly replied, “If you’re asking me if I want to compete again, the answer is hell yes.” He said he didn’t expect it happen, but “if there was ever a window—would I like to run the Chicago Marathon when I’m 50? I would love to.”

He later added, in a comment sure to elicit howls from his detractors, “This may not be the most popular answer, but I think I deserve it.” He justified this by saying that other racers who had committed similar misdeeds had only been suspended for six months. In a moment of equivocation that typified the interview, he said, “I deserve to be punished, but I’m not sure that I deserved the death penalty.”

Nearly lost in the maneuvering were a couple of apologies and what he characterized as his ongoing attempts to exorcise the arrogance that caused his bad decisions and ultimately his fall from grace, he said. He repeatedly described that as “a process” and said, “There’s not gonna be one tectonic shift here.”

Asked by Winfrey what he would say to the people who believed in him and wore his yellow Livestrong bracelets, he said, “I understand your anger, your sense of betrayal.” He said he was sorry and that he was “committed to spending as long as I have to to make amends.” But the old Armstrong returned, briefly, when Winfrey asked about allegations that someone tried to bribe USADA on his behalf. “Not true,” he said, tersely, pointing out that that allegation was notably missing from the agency’s 1,000-page decision.

But the segments in which he described his family were, at least for those inclined to support Armstrong, among the more memorable. He said his mother was “a wreck.” He revealed that his former wife, Kristin, was aware of the doping “on a need-to-know basis,” but that she made him promise not to “cross the line again” when he returned to cycling in 2009. He said he kept that promise.

Armstrong said he didn’t tell the truth to his three older children—his 13-year-old and his 11-year-old twins—until the recent holiday break. He said he told them, “I want you to know it’s true.” The kids, he said, “didn’t say much. They just accepted it. ” Of Luke, he said, “Thank God he’s more like Kristin than he’s like me.”

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